FreeRTOS.org™ VERSION 4 IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR IMMEDIATE DOWNLOAD – INCLUDING SUPPORT FOR LUMINARY MICRO’S STELLARIS™ FAMILY OF ARM CORTEX M3&trade BASED MICROCONTROLLERS

FreeRTOS.org Version 4 Port and Demo Application Included in Luminary Micro’s Stellaris Development Kit and Available From www.FreeRTOS.org

(Bristol, UK) – March 27, 2006 - The Bristol-based company announces today the immediate availability of FreeRTOS.org ports supporting Luminary Micro’s Stellaris™ family of microcontrollers, featuring the ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller core. FreeRTOS.org is a portable, open source, miniature Real Time Kernel for use in embedded applications. FreeRTOS.org is free to download and royalty free for use even in commercial applications, subject to the license.

The FreeRTOS.org port for Stellaris microcontrollers is also included in Luminary Micro’s Stellaris Development Kits, along with a pre-configured demonstration application showing the use of FreeRTOS.org in small application environments.

“We are very pleased to be able to offer our embedded microcontroller customers access to this high quality open source RTOS,” said Jean Anne Booth, Chief Marketing Officer of Luminary Micro. “We downloaded and used FreeRTOS.org in the engineering development test environment during the development of our new Stellaris family of microcontrollers, and we found FreeRTOS.org to be both easy to use and highly efficient in real embedded memory-constrained applications. Now that we have released the first of the Stellaris microcontrollers to the market, we anticipate that our customers will find FreeRTOS.org to be as useful as we did.”

FreeRTOS.org version 4 supports preemptive, cooperative, and co-routine execution. Co-routine execution is new with this release and is ideal for embedded systems with small RAM availability. Co-routines are prioritized, function co-operatively, share a stack with the task in which they run, and require very little RAM. This makes FreeRTOS.org version 4 ideal for the first members of the Stellaris family of microcontrollers; both the LM3S101 and LM3S102 feature 8Kbytes of flash memory and 2K bytes of SRAM.

“Based on their positive experiences using FreeRTOS.org during silicon development, Luminary Micro contacted us about adding a FreeRTOS.org port and demo application in their Stellaris Development Kit, and we were happy to oblige,” said FreeRTOS.org founder Richard Barry. “We have seen a marked increase of interest in ARM-based microcontrollers in general, and after working with early Stellaris family silicon, we think the availability of the first ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers will accelerate this trend.”

FreeRTOS.org is gaining popularity with users on all continents for its easy accessibility and simplicity of use. Newly available and commercially backed development and support packages, along with ARM Cortex M3 support will further increase its appeal.

About FreeRTOS.org
Based in Bristol, UK, The FreeRTOS.org project oversees and maintains the open source development of the FreeRTOS.org kernel. FreeRTOS.org is a portable, open source, mini Real Time Kernel - a free to download and royalty free RTOS that can be used in commercial applications (see license text available on http://www.FreeRTOS.org). Contact Richard Barry at r . barry‘@‘FreeRTOS . org for more information.

About Luminary Micro, Inc.
Founded in 2005, Luminary Micro, Inc. designs, markets and sells ARM Cortex-M3-based microcontrollers (MCUs). Privately held Austin, Texas-based Luminary Micro is ARM’s lead partner for Cortex-M3, delivering the world’s first silicon implementation of the Cortex-M3 core. Luminary Micro’s introduction of the Stellaris™ family provides 32-bit performance for the same price as current 8- and 16-bit microcontroller designs. With entry-level pricing at $1.00 for an ARM-based MCU, Luminary Micro’s Stellaris product line allows for standardization that eliminates future architectural upgrades or software tools changes. Contact the company at 512 279 8800 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it for more information.